The underworld library h.., p.1
The Underworld Library (Hellbrary Book 1), page 1
Published by Syrenka Publishing LLC
Copyright © 2021, Laura Bickle
Cover art by Pretty in Ink Creations
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved. Aside from brief quotations for media coverage and reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced or distributed in any form without the author’s permission. Thank you for supporting authors and a diverse, creative culture by purchasing this book and complying with copyright laws.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
About the Author
Acknowledgments
Novels By Laura Bickle
A vast desert of salt stretched beneath the endless river of a starry sky. The white salt reflected the light of a waning moon shining down on a line of mortals and creatures slogging single file across the dunes. These were not true stars nor the true moon from the Heavens, but artificial ones that had been hung by dark hands long before recorded history. They were nearly indistinguishable from their real counterparts. Or so it had been said by those few who had seen both. The moon and stars gazed down, unblinking, on the line of the damned marching across the desert. That line stretched from star-spangled horizon to horizon, a dark ribbon undulating against the white.
Everything was reduced to black and white here, as the King had intended when he created it millennia ago. Like many places in the Underworld, it was both beautiful and terrible to behold.
And he hated this place for it.
Ral slogged forward, barefoot in the salt. Since time before recorded time, salt had always symbolized purification, and this place was no exception. His blood stained the salt as he walked, the evidence reduced to black speckles in the light and shadow. As the wind whipped it up, the salt stung not only his feet, but also his myriad other open wounds. His wings had once been white, with black at the pinfeathers, as if dipped in ink. Once magnificent like his mother’s, the wind and salt had shredded them to dirty clutches of hollow sticks.
Another winged creature swept down from the sky, its talons ripping into Ral’s shoulder. Ral tried to shrug it away, too exhausted to fight it further. The red-eyed carrion bird plucked a strip of flesh from his shoulder and tore it away. It silently climbed into the sky with its prize.
Ahead of him, more carrion birds swept into the line, plucking out an eye, nipping away a finger, and stripping flesh from the bones of the damned. Men and women and creatures from both Earth and the Underworld plodded and flailed, trying to drive off the carrion birds that would eventually be the end of them.
Ral stepped over a body that had fallen. This one looked to be one of the Ker, one of the water people. The man lay on his side in the fetal position, ribs exposed. The salt had desiccated him, as it did the others. His remaining skin hung wrinkled and cured on his body, as if mummified. Fins extending from his arms to his ribs were nearly transparent, dusted with salt crystals. The fins attached to his legs had worn away to shriveled spikes, with no connective tissue between the filmy spindles. This one had walked for as long as he could, but the Ker never lasted long in this place.
A man in line behind Ral, a mortal dressed in rags that might have once been fine garments, gasped when he saw the body. “Is he…is he dead?”
Ral’s bloody lips curled as he glanced back. “You’re dead, you know. Most everyone here is.”
“But…” The man’s brow furrowed. “But I’ve been dead a long time. I thought…I thought we lived forever here. Eternal punishment and all.”
“You’re new.” Ral rolled his eyes. “We ‘live’ here until we are killed. When we’re killed, we go to into the Nothingness. We cease to exist, snuffed out. And there’s no coming back from that.”
“That sounds a fair sight better than what we’ve got now,” the mortal grumbled. He flapped his arms at a carrion bird that came down to rip out some of his hair.
Ral glanced up, to the top of the nearest dune. He and the carrion birds were not the only winged creatures in this expanse. At the top of the dune stood the three Hatyx sisters, shadows against the lighter black of the sky. Moonlight shone through their bat-like wings, showing maps of blood vessels through the leathery surface. The Hatyx were armored in copper from neck to foot, red as a forgotten sunset—the only spot of color in this place. Tangles of wild black hair were shaken loose from braids in the wind, and red eyes oversaw the continuous plodding in the salt. Bright blades were sheathed at their hips, though fingers rested on the hilts as they watched. They served Caldrius, the king of the Underworld, without question. They oversaw this suffering with no particular glee that Ral could detect, but he still hated them.
“Is this ever going to stop?” the mortal behind Ral wailed.
“It will stop when you become Nothing,” a woman ahead of Ral snarled. “Or when Caldrius wills it.” Her hair, which had been luxuriously long and swung around her hips just days ago, had now been reduced to a few bloody strings.
Ral’s hands curled into fists. He tired of this ceaseless punishment. He’d been here a month, and there had been no sign that he would be released from this. He had expected a day here, maybe two, as punishment for his crimes. But this had gone on long enough.
“Think,” he whispered. “There are more of us than there are of them.” His chin jerked up to the Hatyx sisters. “Them and their carrion birds.”
The woman before him glanced at him with widened eyes. “They are the best warriors of the Underworld, and they are armed. No one has ever opposed the Hatyx.”
“But look how many of us there are.” The man behind him rubbed his stubbly chin.
The line of penitents stretched from horizon to horizon, a snake of blood and bone and fallen bodies as far as the eye could see.
“Besides,” she said. “There’s nowhere to escape to.”
Ral shrugged. “What’s the worst thing that can happen?”
The man seemed to struggle to come up with an answer. “We become Nothing.”
“Exactly.” Ral nodded. He let that sink in.
The woman wrapped her arms around herself, watching a carrion bird pull a tooth out of an old man’s head. “You know, he has a point.”
Whispers traveled up and down the line, beneath the shudder of wings from above and above the trail of footprints. The whispers faded when a Hatyx would fly overhead, her shadow shushing the bleeding lips of the speakers.
“Which one is that?” the man asked. Mortals couldn’t really tell the Hatyx apart anymore, since they had not come to Earth in thousands of years.
“Hate,” Ral said. He could tell them apart easily. Hate had a scar on her upper lip.
“And the other two?”
Ral gazed at the dune. “Fear on the left. Wrath on the right.” Wrath was taller than fear, always had been.
Hate gazed at him as she flew by, her heart-shaped face coldly impassive while her eyes glowed like coals.
“It’s like she knows you,” the mortal said.
Ral shrugged and did not answer. He never owed mortals any answers.
The whispers filtered through the line inexorably. Eventually, a deposed general spoiling for a fight proposed that the prisoners would attack the Hatyx when the moon was at its apogee. The lucky would become Nothing. And there was a chance that some among them might be even luckier, and somehow taste a moment of freedom.
“Freedom!” The whispers moved down the line, and the sighs. “The end of suffering.”
Ral smiled. Such inspiring words. Mortals were good at that, at reframing reality to fit their vision.
The moon eventually set and rose again. It always rose in the east and set in the west, the way the true moon in the Heavens did. But no sun ever came to replace it, and the night reigned eternal. But he was amused to see the mortals try.
The moon climbed overhead, veiled by a line of tattered clouds over the snow-bright desert. It looked almost peaceful as they marched, moving into the eternal light and dark. Ral had followed this line for weeks, often with his eyes shut, hearing the crunch of his feet in the salt and the cries of the dead around him.
This would soon be over, he reminded himself.
For him, anyway.
The line rippled, as if the wind blew the black ribbon of souls. A ragged cry whipped up among the mortals and monsters in the line, snagging the attention of the Hatyx sisters. High on a dune over the line, they stood, watching. Wind pushed behind them, streaming ghosts of sand off the lip of the dune. Their knees had sunk deep in the sand.
Hate unsheathed her sword. Ral expected that there was some part of her that relished the thought of rebellion, of cutting down the penitent souls below them.
The line of prisoners surged up, up the dune toward the Hatyx sisters, like ants struggling to scramble up a hill of sugar.
Wrath took wing with two great flaps, sweeping down the side of the dune. She drew he
The line had congealed, though. The line had halted, and prisoners from the distance had rushed in a wave back to where Ral stood. The black wave climbed the dune, hundreds and thousands of souls pushing each other up, up, to reach the Hatyx. Carrion birds swept down to rip at the feast of flesh. Hate had gotten into the action by now, howling a bell-like battle shriek that chilled Ral to the bone.
He let the surge buffet him up the dune. He pushed forward, moving to be at the crest of the wave, reaching for the lip of the dune on which Fear now stood.
Fear gazed down at them with shining eyes. Her sword flashed as it bit into leathery flesh with a sound like an axe slicing through lumber. Fear did not howl like her sister; Fear was always silent.
The wave of damned pushed Ral up, up over the top of the dune. He looked back, down at the concave slope of the dune made black with the riot of souls. It was too much weight, as he had anticipated, and the dune began to collapse. A hole formed in the dune’s side, sucking people in, then opened into a landslide as the side of the salt hill began to shear away.
But the damned had gotten their hands on Fear, clutching at her ankle as she struggled to take flight. She swung at them with her glittering blade. They dragged at her, shouting, pulling her down into the landslide.
Ral struggled to claw his way over the top of the disintegrating dune. He scrambled to his feet and ran perpendicular to the falling cliff of salt. Screams and curses echoed into the night. He forced the last of his energy into finding more solid ground, lurching with an uneven gait. His skin had tanned to leather, and it restricted the movement of his bones and muscles.
In frustration, he took three quick steps and flapped the tatters of his wings. He gained little altitude, wind tearing through the ruined feathers. He spun, unbalanced, but managed to get himself aloft.
He looked back at the slide of the dune moving down into the valley below, erasing thousands of the dead, pushing them into Nothingness. Hate and Wrath struggled to pull Fear from the ravenous grip of the dead, slashing at the damned and trying to haul her to the crest of the disaster.
Ral flapped his wings with all his might and plunged away into the desert. Screams echoed behind him, screams falling into Nothingness.
He smiled. His plan had succeeded. He had escaped.
He bobbed and fluttered like a moth before a flame. Mere yards from the ground, he flew as far as he could, leaving the prisoners and the dune and the Hatyx and the Nothingness behind until the horizon was smooth desert. He left no footsteps as he fled. His right wing had more intact feathers than the left, and his shoulders ached from trying to compensate.
But he was unable to maintain his pathetic altitude for long, and crashed into the ground like a downed kite. He sucked in his breath through stinging lips. Freedom tasted like blood and salt.
Grimacing, he hauled himself to his feet. Salt clung to the tatters of his clothes and his desiccated skin. He tried to brush some of it off, but it was no use. Salt permeated the very atmosphere.
He knew that if he didn’t find someplace safe, he was as good as Nothing. Once the Hatyx had gotten a handle on the rebellion, they would need to dig out the victims to take an inventory. They might use the carrion birds for that. But they might send a few out to look for stragglers. They would have much to answer for to the king of the Underworld, after all, for punishments cut short.
Ral had to find someplace safe. However, safe was a relative concept, in this desolate wilderness.
He trudged west. One wing dragged in the salt, drawing a sidewinder trail amid the footprints behind him. Nothing much lived here; nothing much could, in this pure expanse. But he forged onward, across the landscape sculpted by wind. The wind howled behind him, sweeping away the evidence of his footprints. The sky overhead had thickened, clouds pushing in.
It occurred to him that if he failed now, he might never be found. His father would never know what had happened to him. He felt a thrill of satisfaction, then, thinking of the guilt that might wrack his father at his youngest son’s death. His father was not stone; he would feel something.
But that was not enough. He wanted his father to feel true pain. And he wanted to feel the sting of victory over him.
The Salt Desert flattened, sweeping into a landscape of pale mesas and steppes. The mesas drew shadows down from the sky, soaking in them like bones in blood.
Ral pressed on, finding a worn path in the earth. Salt still glittered here, but only a dusting; it had given away to pock-marked stone and lime-bleached earth. Ral had heard that this and the desert were once part of a great sea that Caldrius had destroyed long ago. He could see evidence of this in tiny fossils of strange, arachnid creatures pressed into the walls of the mesas. Here and there, withered grasses waved like sea oats, while rodents scuttled among them and crawled up into pockets in the stone, where they nested.
And they nested not only in stone, but in the eyes of skulls of great beasts that littered the landscape. Ral passed broken human skulls, a horse skull with its eyes stuffed with grass, even the skull of a cyclops turned upside down like a bowl. The skull was stained black, its bones arranged around it in a haphazard fashion. Ribs reached upward like claws, taller than a man. Ral stepped through them as if they were sapling trees.
A snake slithered through the debris, chasing a rodent. It was as pale as the bones, almost indistinguishable from them in this landscape. It did not cast so much as a black-eyed glance at Ral, slipping after its quarry. Ral watched in fascination as it struck, catching the rodent in its jaws and swallowing it whole.
Even as he watched the snake, he knew he was also being watched. And not by the local wildlife. He could feel it, prickling down his spine. But he did not turn or show the slightest expression of fear. To do so would be disastrous. Instead, he straightened his posture and slowed his pace, daring the unseen eyes that followed him to make the first move.
He was not disappointed. A reedy voice, thin as a ghost’s, demanded of him: “Who dares enter the dominion of the Cix, the realm of the Blood Ilk?”
Ral lifted his chin. “It is I, Ral the Unforgiven, Prince of the Dark Palace.”
An insectile clicking rose from all around him, and the voice returned in disbelief: “You claim to be Ral, the son of Caldrius, King of the Underworld?”
Ral set his teeth at the mention of his father. “I am.”
The chattering rose to a rustling. Shadows of the mesas congealed, and humanoid shapes oozed from them. The Cix came into his line of sight, a dozen of them. They were pale and dark-haired, sharp of jaw and cheekbone, gazing upon Ral with black eyes. Those eyes were not human; they were black compound insectile eyes set in human-looking faces, having the appearance of faceted obsidian set in the sockets. The Cix glided with an inhuman grace toward him, dressed in dark uniforms covered in white dust; they were a patrol squad, Ral guessed. They carried no weapons—they did not need them. Their fingers were long and clawed, shining and sharp as polished bone. In their own deadly way, they were beautiful.
A Cix man stood before him, gazing at him with suspicion. This must be their captain. Ral met his gaze. The Cix man looked him up and down, at his leathered skin, torn feathers, and bloody lip.
He opened his mouth to speak, and he did so with a punctuation of clicks, for his mouth beyond his human-looking lips was entirely alien. Like the rest of the Cix, his mouth was insectile, with toothlike mandibles and a curling proboscis that slipped beyond his mouth like a tongue when he spoke. “I have seen Ral of the Dark Palace many years ago. You do not look like him.”
Another Cix soldier smiled at him, lips pulling back from quivering mandibles. “We could taste him. See if his ‘royal’ blood tastes any different from the others.”
A rumble of agreement rippled among the soldiers. Judging by the thick layer of dust on their clothing, they had been on patrol for no small amount of time, and they were no doubt hungry for blood. Ral was reminded of the stories of the Blood Ilk on Earth, when they would occasionally slip out of the Underworld to hunt. They’d given rise to the legends of vampires, and those stories had amused Ral in the past. Not now, when he was an anonymous wanderer in the middle of nowhere facing a wall of them.
